We both knew this subject would be difficult and I couldn't have written it as comprehensive as you've written it. I would've confused the s^&% out of everyone too, lol. Well done!

Now that the topic has been 'thrown out there' our readers can ask, comment and discuss. With input from readers this topic will really become a monster. And, from what I've seen, its a monster that you won't find anywhere else.

I completely agree, Joe. This is some excellent condensed and concise information about a very tricky topic.

Thanks, guys. This was a sort of a thorn in my side. The more you say about it the more you make it what it is not. And since it is more defined by what it is not than what it is, what do you say? I had to explain enough so that someone could begin to use it without turning it into a dogmatic system so that they could not use it!

Sounds great - once linear progression stops working. If a beginner is able to add 5lbs each workout with the same number of reps/sets why mess around with double or triple progression? Once he hits his max, resets and hits his max again then SDT becomes a useful tool as liner progression has come to a halt and he now needs to alternate intensity and volume to make gains.

Thanks for the comment.

"If a beginner can do this, why do that?" is pretty much the standby argument for that mentality.

Let me pose some similar questions.

If I can drive 120 miles per hour in a rain storm, why should I drive 55?

If I can hammer a nail in with a sledgehammer, why should I use a regular hammer?

If I can saw a 2x4 in half with a chainsaw, why should I use a skillsaw?

If I can live on a diet of twinkies, why should I eat anything else?

I could go on and on with that. The purpose is not to prove, with those rhetorical questions, that the assumptions about beginner training are invalid, it is to show that rhetorical questions themselves are invalid as a means of argument. I outlined in that article many reasons why. I did not simply say "why not?" So, to you, I would answer that question, with "Why SHOULD a beginner train that way?" Not why should he NOT, why SHOULD he?

I can tell you a million reasons why something should not be.

Most beginners can make linear progression. However there are a lot of loaded assumptions in the word "progression". What you, and some other people might call progression, i.e. "adding weight" to the bar while movement quality breaks down, I do NOT call progression. And neither do most strength trainers and coaches who are looking to improve someone's performance, not just stroke their ego with a loaded bar.

The assumption that just by virtue of doing a few magical exercises like squats that everything will work itself out is just plain wrong. While you use so called linear "progression" coupled with intensity cycling for months on end you see amplitude of movement decreasing, coordination decreasing, and you may also notice that the trainee becomes LESS able to correct technical mistakes. All this can be accompanied by a host of other problems. The other big problem is see with this type of training is it is MUNDANE and BORING. That in itself is a mark of bad programming in my book.

Linear progression…I love the lip service people give to these terms. SDT is linear. In what way can it be defined as non linear? The term linear refers to how the training is periodized. How it is "progressed" is the parameters used to add stimulus of some kind. SDT, just by itself is linear. We are not looking to train different or overlapping qualities or skill. Try again on that one.

I have no problem at all with a beginner simply adding some weight to the bar for a while in a simple "linear" way. I do have a problem with them being thrown under a bus by the insistence that they are supposed to "milk" this progress with a silly and inefficient intensity cycling scheme that has failure, in myriad ways, built into it.

Intensity cycling in itself, sucks. There is nothing more discouraging and unproductive than constantly having to back off you weights! Why would anyone want to train that way? I did it. I've run every kind of "5X5" you can imagine and it always got me worse off in the long run because of all the reasons I've discussed. There is on thing I never ask a trainee to do and that is to backtrack and play catch up! No wonder most people don't stick to training. Apply that to any other skill and ask how it sounds.

(That does not mean I never ask a trainee to lighten the bar but that I don't ask them to run over the same ground again. Everything is moving forward in some way. Not going back and getting a "do over". That's just going through the motions and getting it done. Getting it done is not good enough.)

But it is not intensity that is an issue with the beginner. To assume that all beginners will not progress unless they constantly back off intensity in a simple formulaic way is ridiculous. Usually it's volume that is the problem with the typical trainee.

Truthfully, however, I do not want to get into yet another analysis of this. The purpose of this article was not to show an alternative to another alternative. It was also not meant solely for beginners. It is pretty simple to sit down an make up a beginner's strength program. And we could do that with a handful of exercises using SDT and it would be more sustainable for a beginner and would actually consider quality not just weight on the bar.

However, the first way of progressing I mentioned is to add weight to the bar. There is nothing to suggest that a person cannot add weight to the bar a successive number of times. There is likewise, no reason to believe that the only efficient way to progress for a beginner is to add weight to the bar until they hit a wall and then play catchup after stripping the bar. It is beyond me how people can convince themselves that intentionally running into a wall, backing up, and running into it again, and then again, until some undetermined time comes when they decide the wall is coming up too fast, is efficient. To me, that is the definition of insanity.

Beyond that, though, you comments are assuming that I mean for people to train every exercises the same…I don't. I am not intending to just hand people a one size fits all cookie cutter and say, try not to hurt yourselves, kiddies! I am offering some parameters and means for people to apply some thought and experimentation to learn about how to create some sustained progress. Whats more, I am here waiting for people, if they would like help with any of this. That would include those people who would like to "just add 5 pounds to the bar every workout".

With all that said I want to get into this "rhetorical question" thing. I love all the fallacies that come up and this is a big one.

You could call this begging the question. I think you could anyway, I'm not a professional logician. I mean if I were a Greek I'd be a Greek God not a Greek lawyer. Ok, so I'd be a slave, probably. But a totally kick ass slave.

I'll repeat the question: If a beginner can add 5 pounds to bar every workout, why should he ___?

That question uses the very argument it wishes to prove as an argument! By asking it, you haven't shown that this is the best way to progress or certainly that everyone can and should do it, you have simply assumed that. It's circular logic.

After that assumption and it's acceptance you can easily reason away all other arguments. For instance, it is implying that NOT adding 5 pounds to the bar every workout is always undesirable and always bad for a beginner. So any argument that doesnt assume that a beginner should do this is thrown down as "bad". It's all ludicrous and it has no authority because it stifles discussion by a rhetorical means.

Let me frame it a different way.

I want to sell you a program that will teach you, using ancient Kungfu secrets, to leap onto the roof of your house.

Now who wouldn't want to be able to leap onto a roof?

A sensible and skeptical man says, "I think a ladder is more likely to be successful".

And I say, "Why would you use a ladder, when you can leap up in one bound?" Therefore "proving" that my program is better than a plain old ladder.

Another rhetorical method that these cookie cutters use is the pairing of ideas so that one idea becomes synonymous with another idea that is not actually necessarily a parellel idea. For instance one that you see regarding the beginner training thing and just about everywhere else including technolodgy is "fast and efficient".

Usually, when you use this kind of pairing it is to emphasize an idea with two different ways or expressing the same emotion or general idea. This is how we are used to hearing it. For instance, when I say, "it's nice and cool out today", I could mean the same thing by just saying it's cool out or it's nice out. I don't necessarily have to mean it but to say it's nice AND it's cool, is just to provide rhetorical emphasis to the idea.

With fast and efficient you turn that around on people by making them assume that fast means efficient and efficient means fast. But it doesn't. The fastest way to add weight to the bar is not always the most efficient way to progress. The most efficient way to progress is not always the fastest way to add weight to the bar. As soon as I stop assuming that these things are not synonymous, I stop having unreasonable expectations about my training.

Progression in training could be compared to a car and it's fuel efficiency. The faster you make the car, the worse it's fuel efficiency. If you want a car to have top performance and the best fuel efficiency it can, you have to strike a balance. You also have to be specific about your goals.

If I were just to say I want the best performance and the best efficiency then I could simply argue that to me, performance is synonymous with efficiency. But performance is not a general thing…it is specific.

It's the same with training. In order to decide what is the most efficient way to increase performance you must first decide what you consider to be good performance and what is acceptable, in terms of a cost benefit analysis. Just piling weight on the bar every workout, with no cost benefit analysis, is not to me, the definition of performance, since there is no thought given to anything other than how much weight is on the bar.

Here is an old post on a similar vane:

http://www.gustrength.com/forum/t-146557/kiss#post-446976

I guess I should get more into the notion of linear progression and what that means. First of all it has become nothing more than a term meant to apply to novice trainees for the first few months of strength training. That of itself makes it un-useful since you are basically making assumptions as to how novices can and should progress and then appropriating a term for that progression. If you believe that to be basic why not call it basic progression.

Basically linear progression is implying that if you looked at increases or improvements in performance, on a QUANTITATIVE basis, those improvements would more or less form a straight line.

When you measure performance quantitatively, you pick one measure of performance. In this case, weight on the bar.

Linear progression becomes a meaningless term over a career since ANY progression, when measured over a long enough time period, becomes more or less a straight line. I can't say a perfectly straight line so let's just assume that if you looked at it on a graph…the progress line would be tending in a general upward direction over time.

Mathematically, a "linear graph" is a graph with a straight line. That would mean that the increases make a consistent pattern. So, increase in weight on the bar of 5, 5, 5, 5, and so on would make a straight line if you plotted it on a graph. By telling you that linear progression is 'best' all that is really being said is that trying to make a perfectly straight line is best. I'm not kidding. That's really all there is to it. Now, of course this so called linear progression doe not really make a straight line unless you plotted it for a short period. It's essentially meaningless.

A line is a line and it does not have to be straight to still be a line. Yet another fallacy is calling straight lines "linear" and other lines "non-linear"! The terms themselves are silly. But anyway…we are not dealing with equations, we are dealing with strength progression.

No matter how you progress, the more you increase the period of time you are looking at, the straighter the line becomes. In other words, all the dips and wiggles smooth out over time. To sum it up…if progress wasn't "linear" it would not be "progress". The line would zigzag up down but never TEND toward a more or less straight line upwards.

So "linear progression" is a meaningless buzz word. All progression, in terms of a certain quality or number, is linear by the sheer fact that it is progression. The idea is that a beginner will make "tremendous" progress using linear progression and that in the long term this actually has an effect on that line graph I described.

Well, not only is the line formed using so-called linear progression and intensity cycling about as jagged a line as you can imagine all those jigs and jags, even if they have the line rising higher after a few months will not represent anything when the line is looked at over a longer term. And since this so-called novice training model only works under ideal conditions (which is assuming all things being perfect and no real cross training or skill work is involved) it is not a real training model but simply a training method with a "model" pinned on to it.

And what really tends to happen is that trainees begin to struggle their ass off to maintain the reps and sets and add weight and you see injuries cropping up even at the end of the first month sometimes or little nagging problems.

This begs the question, of course, of whether it makes sense at all to measure progress purely on a quantitative basis. And it does not and no trainer worth his paycheck would think so.

Yes, I know I've used "begging the question" in two different ways. The second way how most of us use it and the first way how about five logicians use it whose hobby is to recreate Ancient Greece on the weekends and dress up in togas.

Here are two charts showing an imaginary squat progression over ten weeks. The first one could be using an SDT type progression or any kind of slow steady progression. The second one is only adding weight to the bar and using intensity cycling.

I've been generous, to my mind, with the intensity cycling. I've made the overall progression, in terms of weight to be more than with the first progression. But notice the linear notion doesn't bear a lot of weight except for the fact that yes, it is a line.

Ten Week Squat Progression: SDT or other sustainable progression

Ten week squat progression adding weight to the bar and intensity cycling

So again, the mere fact that you add weight to the bar doesn't mean basic progression is "linear" as opposed to something else, it just means you progressed, at least in those quantitative terms.

Using linear to describe progression implies that it is possible to have non-linear progression. Which is like comparing strength training to quantum mechanics. It would mean:

1. That you could get something out of your training that was disproportionate to what you put in. Or your training could have NO EFFECT at all. Neither of which is possilbe.

2. It would mean that the body adapted in an unpredictable way…meaning simply that you could not plan training at all but simply watch the interesting and unexpected stuff that happens.

To be honest I think "linear" is just a word applied by coaches wishing to sound smart. It doesn't really define anything as distinct from something else. Linear periodization, although that is still a silly name, at least has a concrete definition.

In terms of how quantitative progress really looks, I think most will find the first example more esthetically pleasing.

I made the first one using PR's and the second one using weight added to the bar starting from zero. It's the same thing except I did it this way because I knew that the second method would produce a steeper line and thus, viewed simplistically, I'm still being generous to the intensity cycling by making it look faster in terms of "steeper" progress. This was to show how you can manipulate data. The two graphs are really showing a similar thing.

So at the end of 10 weeks, 30 pounds are added to the bar with SDT and 35 pounds with intensity cycling. Intensity cycling wins! I could have been more generous with that and made it look even better with a steeper hypothetical curve. I just wasn't feeling THAT generous.

Intensity cycling wins over 10 weeks, in this scenario. If you want to look at just the starting and ending number. I happen to know that trainees DO have minds, however, and that steep up and down lines, in terms of real world training, corresponds with a steep up and down state of readiness. The only way to make a trainee feel ready for that kind of constant let down is to stamp your feet, bang your fist on the table and make them believe. At least until the next workout.

Here are some charts, however, showing progression over a more realistic time frame. Thirty weeks. A bit over half a year.

Oops. Intensity cycling stopped working. Couldn't make it to 30 days. Assume that after a point of a couple of weeks of no progress and having already set the weights back a few times the trainee is left scratching his head wondering what to do. Maybe he can now try SDT. But the question is, at the end of 30 days, has he progressed more by virtue of having used intensity cycling.

You don't have to answer that because it is a rhetorical question. Tricked you with rhetoric! You can't answer that because it assumes knowledge about all sorts of things that you don't have. All you have is a bunch of numbers. All anyone is ever given to support this type of training theory is a bunch of numbers. You have know way of knowing how the trainee will respond to what comes next because you know nothing of his state and how the training up till now has actually affected him. He most likely looks like a blob with a barbell attached to it at some point.

This is a graph of steady sustained progression which doesn't hit failure, doesn't ever dial back the weights, has at least a bit more interesting parameters, and, actually thinks about quality along the way:

Now, if I were to make another chart that covered a long enough period of time and I combined that first 30 weeks of intensity cycling with a whole imaginary training career..I could eventually make all those dips and rebounds start to disappear. When viewed in this very clinical, if not completely scientific way, the bumps get smoother and smoother. That applies to the first few months of ANY training. The numbers fade. It also applies to any one period of time during a training career.

And that is why we do NOT measure the first few months of progress in terms of NUMBERS alone! All such progress, at any one period of time, is a snapshot. It is not representative over a career of more efficient or less efficient training since it takes nothing else into consideration, including what is acceptable given a cost benefit analysis.

This whole analysis is ridiculous on the face of it…because the terminology is ridiculous. Within the terms I have set forth in this article, if a trainee simply progresses by loading the bar he is using single progression. The affect that loading the bar will have as opposed to adding volume, etc. will depend on his training status at that time.

To sum it up, the idea that it matters, over any meaningful time period to have progression form a 'straight line' is silly. Because it NEVER WILL. Straight line or 'linear progression' will happen only for very short periods of time in a training career. And the more aggressive the linear loading is, the longer more 'regressive lines' you have (lines that go down).

Thanks Nate. I will blog on and call attention to all this later but I think it's not exactly related to SDT as such.

These are all very general arguments and were meant here not so much to defend SDT because as a concept I don't think it needs to be defended but to rebut the idea that there is a "method" that is automatically more efficient than SDT. OR any other sound and reasonable means to progress.

It was also meant to show that most of the arguments for so called linear progression are rhetorical ones.

Intensity cycling itself has become a more or less dogmatic principle on the bodybuilding forums thanks to institutionalized 5x5's. That I haven't quite tackled enough but to be frank to have to continually backtrack on the tired old ideas that I rejected years ago and people smarter than me never even gave the time of day gets a little tiring. As strength trainers we want to move forward but unfortunately to do that we have to deal with those who have grown rooted to the spot but thanks to force of personality and whatever combination of circumstances have a lot of influence. In a perfect world dinosaurs go extinct, so to speak. In the real word we have to slay them.

Not to sound bitter because I love what I do.

There is a saying about lawyers:

If you have the facts, pound on the facts.
If you have the law, pound on the law.
If you don't have either, pound on the table.

That is how most ideas win over in this industry.

There is more on linear progression here: Misconceptions Abound. In that post I discuss it from another perspective…i.e no charts!